The design goal of many collaboration tools is to reproduce as closely as possible some aspect of the face-to-face meeting experience so that virtual project teams can be as productive as co-located teams. What I have found is that some … Continue reading →

A well-performing virtual team makes effective use of a wide range of collaboration tools. After the various forms of communication discussed in my last post, any self-respecting virtual project team must have access to a decent desktop sharing tool. In … Continue reading →

As someone with a great deal of personal experience working in virtual teams and having managed a collaboration technologies research team for several years, I am very familiar with the obvious as well as subtle problems with the collaboration tools … Continue reading →

We are proud to announce the Beta 2 release of our free/busy calendar sharing service at http://freebusysharing.com. This release adds these features: * Support for Google, Apple iCal, and Microsoft Office.com calendars; * Ability to link more than one calendar … Continue reading →

We are a week away to a possible BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) strike in the San Francisco area…again. If your people can’t get to work, what will you do? Your competition elsewhere in the world is not encumbered by … Continue reading →

The number of technologies we have at our fingertips today to communicate with our virtual project team members is nothing short of daunting. In addition to the most natural and effective method we all know as ” face-to-face,” we have … Continue reading →

It is times like these that I wonder why it is that virtual teams and telecommuting are not a standard part of every company’s business continuity plans or, better still, part of the core of the way of doing business. … Continue reading →

We have just finished our first production version of a free-busy sharing service for Outlook users. You can check it out at FreeBusySharing.com. Using this service, you can share your free/busy calendar data with any Outlook user in the world, … Continue reading →

One of the more difficult team dynamics project managers must face from time-to-time is conflict. The ‘conflict’ can be project-related or interpersonal, but either way, strong feelings are often involved, making rational resolutions difficult. For virtual teams where face-to-face time … Continue reading →

I’m sure you’ve all heard that old saying, “There are old pilots, and there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots.” That adage applies just as well to project managers where ‘bold’ equals ‘risk-taking’. I’m also sure … Continue reading →